Today I came across a tool called .NETZ that
compresses .Net assemblies and executables. It was written in C# and you can
extend it by providing your own compression provider. By default however it
uses the #ZipLib library's
zip compression and achieves about a 60% reduction in size. The .Net 2 compression
provider on the other hand relies on the framework compression.
If I ever need to shrink a really large .Net application at least I now know that
there is a free solution out there.